Page 74 of The Sun & Her Burn

“You and Adam have been divorced for over ten years and you’ve been married to Tate for most of that time,” I reminded her. “Would you have both of us be miserable forever without you?”

Okay, maybe I did have it in me to play games.

Savannah’s small teeth clicked as she snapped her jaw shut at my remark.

“That was unusually rude of you.”

I shrugged. “I am tired. I stayed up most of the last three days working. It might have been blunt, but is it true?Cazzo,you have never encouraged me with any of the women I’ve dated. You must know I have been hopelessly in love with you for very many years. Does that seem fair to you?”

She blinked, caught off guard by my candor.

We did not speak of feelings or our past.

When we spent time together, we simply enjoyed the other’s company, and we rarely even flirted.

But something about being with Linnea, and Adam again, had left me raw and unwilling to hide from myself.

From her.

“Sebastian,” she whispered, leaning forward to play a hand on the table in front of me, almost but not quite an offering. “If that is the case, is not every time we spend together a gift?”

Part of me softened at hearing discernible proof that she was moved by me in her way, too. The other was irritated with her coyness.

I could get drunk off this, Linnea had said when I kissed her, everything she felt shining from those periwinkle eyes.Off you.

Savannah, for her part, could not even bring herself to actually touch me, her fingertips curling over the edge of the table instead of the inside of my thigh.

“Having experienced the bright light of true love, how can you expect me to be content to live in the shade?” I asked quietly.

Savannah rolled her lips between her teeth, obviously torn.

I let the silence roll out uncomfortably between us.

When I sipped the tea as a distraction, I remembered how much I disliked it.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she asked finally. “How love isn’t everything?”

The words hit my heart like a bat to a piñata, shattering bits of it through my bloodstream so I felt as if I was coming apart at my seams.

“To me, it’s everything,” I said clearly. “L’amour che move il sol e l’altre stele. Love that moves the sun and the stars.”

All at once, I was thrown back to the night she and Adam had given me the Patek Phillipe watch.

Savannah had assumed I wanted to bethe manwho moved the sun and the stars.

A powerful force in the universe.

Because she loved power and assumed everyone else did, too.

But Adam and I had both understood the truth.

I wanted nothing more than a love so powerful it moved the sun and the stars, redefined my sense of gravity.

I had thought for a long time that only Savannah and Adam were capable of giving that to me.

But had the beautifully cultivated piece of artwork that sat before me ever been capable of reciprocating that sentiment? Or, like a painting, had her only purpose been to evoke that emotionin others? So she could bask in that adoration while safely separated from reciprocation by glass and frame.

I needed to believe that every mistake Savannah had ever made was because of love. A love so big it overwhelmed her, made her fearful because its sheer enormity threatened to eclipse everything she’d known before it.